Sikhing a Role in Canadian Politics

“Because it’s 2015,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau famously replied when asked why building a gender-balanced cabinet was so important for him. It was indeed 2015 and from the very start women balanced men, 15 to 15, in Trudeau’s cabinet. The prime minister’s longer reply was about the idea of representation. As Trudeau explained, he wanted “a cabinet that looks like Canada.”

It was not only the number of women but also of Sikhs that drew the attention of the media. Trudeau’s cabinet included four Canadian Sikhs, providing a huge political boost to the minority and to the Indo-Canadian community in general. Their overall political representation was further strengthened in 2017, when the New Democratic Party of Canada – currently the third largest party in the country’s House of Commons – chose another Canadian Sikh, Jagmeet Singh, as its leader. As Sikhs originally hail from the Indian state of Punjab, Trudeau later rightly observed that he has more Sikhs in his cabinet than the current prime minister of India, Narendra Modi.

The followers of Sikhism are a religious minority in contemporary India and their faith was formed in the 15th century, an intermingling of Hindu and Muslim religions. The region of Punjab is the homeland of Sikhs and indeed the land of their sacred sites. Yet, over the centuries Sikhs had also established themselves in other parts of India. As Punjab was split between Indian and Pakistani territories in 1947, there is a Sikh community with important places of worship also in Pakistan. Later, in the second half of the 20th century many Sikhs – and indeed many Indians – left their country in search of better lives and settled in places such as United Kingdom, United States, or Canada.

“You can find potatoes and Sikhs in all the countries of the world,” is a joke I once heard from an Indian.

Sikhs were from the very beginning at the forefront of Indian emigration to Canada and thus their number among Indo-Canadians is disproportionately high when compared to the percentage of Sikhs in the population of India or Pakistan. Possibly the first large batch of Indians came to Canada between 1904 and 1908. There were a few thousand of them and a majority were Sikhs. In 1908, however, Canada closed its gates to Indian migrants with a combination of regulations that effectively made it impossible for poorer Indians to enter the country. Canada remained out of reach for Indians until 1947 and even in the next few decades barriers remained in place.

The most notorious event in the history of Sikh migration to Canada belongs to this 1908-1947 period. In 1914 a ship named Komagata Maru nearly reached the Canadian shore carrying more than 300 Indian passengers hoping to start a life in Canada, most of them Sikhs. The Indians, however, were not allowed to disembark and after a long stand-off the ship was forcefully sent back. After months of travelling back to India, the ship reached Calcutta where many of the Indians were arrested and some reportedly died in a clash with the police. If Trudeau had his “Because it’s 2015” moment, the Komagata Maru incident can be summarized with a short, “Because it was 1914.”

In recent years, however, some Canadian politicians did issue apologies for the treatment of Komagata Maru and, unsurprisingly, Trudeau announced an apology from the prime minister post in 2016.

In the decades after World War II, Canada began to gradually open itself to migrants, including Indians. The trickle changed to a flood in the 1970s. A 1993 book (Indian Communities Abroad by Ravindra K. Jain) claims there were 130,000 Sikhs in Canada at the time of writing and that they constituted more than a half of Indians in the country. According to the 2011 census the followers of Sikhism numbered more than 460,000 and constituted around 1.4 percent of Canada’s total population.

After the partition of India, scores of Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus had been forced to leave the part of Punjab awarded to Pakistan; many of them settled in Delhi and worked hard to become a part of the city’s middle class. In 2004 or 2005 an Indian colleague of mine was surprised to witness a Sikh begging on Delhi’s streets – in his view their community was so well-off that such a sight was rare. The Sikhs were by and large equally successful in Canada. From this perspective it is hardly surprising that some have made it into politics.

Trudeau’s Sikh ministers are Harjit Sajjan (minister of defense), Amarjeet Sohi (minister of infrastructure and communities), Bardish Chagger (minister of small business and tourism), and Navdeep Bains (minister of innovation, science, and economic development). But they are not the only and not the first Sikhs in Canadian politics. Bardish Chagger’s father, for example, had been a politician as well. One of the best known Sikh politicians in Canada is Ujjal Dev Singh Dosanjh, who served as the premier of British Columbia from 2000 to 2001. A record number of 19 Indo-Canadians made it to the Canadian parliament in the 2015 elections and, once again, Sikhs formed a majority of them. These elections also witnessed all the three major parties – the New Democratic Party of Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada, and the Conservative Party – fielding Indo-Canadians who often had to compete with each other. The recent choice of Jagmeet Singh for the New Democratic Party’s leader is just yet another step for Canada’s Sikhs march into politics.

But the rise of Sikhs in Canadian politics offers challenges as well. Many immigrant communities worldwide put special focus on their original homeland, rather than their new nations – compensating for the loss of their first homeland with fervent nationalism from afar. Just as some Irish descendants in the United States had supported the militant Irish Republican Army (IRA), a chunk of Canadian Sikhs support or even belong to radical Sikh organizations, including those that call for an independent Sikh state, Khalistan, that they would like to carve out of India. It is suspected that the bombing of the Air India flight in 1985 – in which mostly Indo-Canadians lost their lives – was a work of Sikh radicals. Some Canadian-Sikh politicians from both Trudeau’s Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party of Jagmeet Singh are suspected of being connected to such fringe radical groups or at least having a soft view on them.

Honoring the sentiments of the country’s minority is not the same as tolerating the sentiments of the radical minority within that minority. When Trudeau as Canadian prime minister apologized for the Komagatu Maru, he paid respect not only to Canadian-Sikhs or Indo-Canadians but Indians in general. But in 2012 the same Trudeau reportedly joined a march of Canadian-Sikhs who demanded that Balwant Singh Rajoana – a Sikh separatist and radical who had murdered the chief minister of the Indian state of Punjab – should not be awarded the death sentence by the Indian judiciary. While giving Sikhs more political space has become a trademark of Canadian liberal politics, there is some concern that such liberalism should not allow marginal radicalism to grow.